Plants specifically improved for agriculture, horticulture, biomass conversion, and other industries (e.g. paper industry, plants as production factories for proteins or other compounds) can be obtained using molecular technologies. As an example, great agronomic value can result from enhancing plant growth in saline conditions.
A wide variety agriculturally important plant species demonstrate significant sensitivity to saline water and/or soil. Upon salt concentration exceeding a relatively low threshold, many plants suffer from stunted growth, necrosis, and death that results in an overall stunted appearance and reduced yields of plant material, seeds, fruit and other valuable products. Physiologically, plants challenged with salinity experience disruption in ion and water homeostasis, inhibition of metabolism, and damage to cellular membranes that result in developmental arrest and cell death (Huh et al. (2002) Plant J, 29(5):649-59).
In many of the world's most productive agricultural regions, agricultural activities themselves lead to increased water and soil salinity, which threatens their sustained productivity. One example is crop irrigation in arid regions that have abundant sunlight. After irrigation water is applied to cropland, it is removed by the processes of evaporation and evapotranspiration. While these processes remove water from the soil, they leave behind dissolved salts carried in irrigation water. Consequently, soil and groundwater salt concentrations build over time, rendering the land and shallow groundwater saline and thus damaging to crops.
In addition to human activities, natural geological processes have created vast tracts of saline land that would be highly productive if not saline. In total, approximately 20% of the irrigated lands in are negatively affected by salinity. (Yamaguchi and Blumwald, 2005, Trends in Plant Science, 10: 615-620). For these and other reasons, it is of great interest and importance to identify genes that confer improved salt tolerance characteristics to thereby enable one to create transgenic plants (such as crop plants) with enhanced growth and/or productivity characteristics in saline conditions.
The availability and sustainability of a stream of food and feed for people and domesticated animals has been a high priority throughout the history of human civilization and lies at the origin of agriculture. Specialists and researchers in the fields of agronomy science, agriculture, crop science, horticulture, and forest science are even today constantly striving to find and produce plants with an increased growth potential to feed an increasing world population and to guarantee a supply of reproducible raw materials. The robust level of research in these fields of science indicates the level of importance leaders in every geographic environment and climate around the world place on providing sustainable sources of food, feed and energy.
Manipulation of crop performance has been accomplished conventionally for centuries through selection and plant breeding. The breeding process is, however, both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, appropriate breeding programs must be specially designed for each relevant plant species.
On the other hand, great progress has been made in using molecular genetic approaches to manipulate plants to provide better crops. Through the introduction and expression of recombinant nucleic acid molecules in plants, researchers are now poised to provide the community with plant species tailored to grow more efficiently and yield more product despite suboptimal geographic and/or climatic environments. These new approaches have the additional advantage of not being limited to one plant species, but instead being applicable to multiple different plant species (Zhang et al. (2004) Plant Physiol. 135:615; Zhang et al. (2001) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98:12832).
Despite this progress, today there continues to be a great need for generally applicable processes that improve forest or agricultural plant growth to suit particular needs depending on specific environmental conditions. To this end, the present invention is directed to advantageously manipulating plant tolerance to salinity in order to maximize the benefits of various crops depending on the benefit sought, and is characterized by expression of recombinant DNA molecules in plants. These molecules may be from the plant itself, and simply expressed at a higher or lower level, or the molecules may be from different plant species.